Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 385

Ali Mazrui and Me

I am asked on a regular basis, on campus and off, a question I assume is posed to many scholars of Africa, especially non-African ones like me: “What made you decide to teach African history?” And whether I give the long or short answer, my reply always begins with explaining the pivotal role Ali Mazrui played in that decision. Basically, I can say with certainty that I would not be a historian of Africa if it were not for Ali Mazrui.

As a high school student in suburban New York, I always sought books, documentaries, maps, and even travel brochures that depicted places we did not learn about in the classroom. For a while, I was particularly obsessed with Australia, and regularly wrote to the Australian tourism agency for literature. Africa was a preoccupation, too, but it was much harder to learn about the continent beyond South Africa, and the mainstream news on that country was grotesquely distorted by American Cold War propaganda. Today, I still recall the excitement I felt, in 1986, when the Public Broadcasting Service advertised a new series called “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” written and narrated by a Kenyan scholar named Ali Mazrui. When the program aired, I eagerly watched every episode and recorded each one on my wood-paneled VHS recorder. It was thrilling to view snapshots of life in Africa, hear Mazrui’s critical viewpoints on western imperialism, and get an accurate description of the vicious apartheid system that was on its way to defeat.

Three years later, the popular news magazine Time ran an article about academic superstars wooed from top universities by rival institutions. I read with delight that Mazrui was leaving the University of Michigan for the State University of New York, Binghamton – now known as Binghamton University – where I was set to begin my sophomore year. I resolved to meet Mazrui as soon as I got to campus just to tell him how much I enjoyed “The Africans.” In retrospect, my determination seems absurd, but it turned out to be a meeting that would change my life.

I did exactly as planned: I showed up one morning at Mazrui’s new Institute of Global Cultural Studies and introduced myself to his long-term assistant Nancy Levis. She directed me into Mazrui’s office and there he was: sitting behind his desk, welcoming me to sit down with what I would come to recognize as his trademark smile. I explained that I wanted to meet him to express my appreciation for his television series. We discussed the program briefly and then he asked about my personal background and educational plans. At the end of our conversation, Mazrui commented on what he perceived to be my passion for Africa, and he made a suggestion that had never crossed my mind: “Why don’t you study African history?” This was a revelation to me since, like many first generation college students, I did not realize all the choices before me and I focused on German history only because of my ancestry. Mazrui’s question led me on a journey that began that semester, enrolling in my first undergraduate African history course at Binghamton, and continues to this very day, teaching my own African history courses at The University of Memphis. And throughout, Mazrui was an advisor, an inspiration, and a role model.

Mazrui’s humanity and decency, his faith in people, and his genuine warmth were all manifested in that first meeting I had with him. His proposal that I study African history was remarkable beyond the fact he had just met me, a 19 year old white undergraduate without any meaningful understanding of Africa or connection to it; I also walked into his office on crutches, as I suffered from Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis which at the time left both of my legs immobile. And, despite my disability, Mazrui never ceased encouraging me, both of us knowing my studies would lead me to graduate school somewhere in the country and extensive fieldwork across the ocean.

All through my undergraduate education, Mazrui guided and supported me. Two examples of his mentorship at Binghamton stand out for me. The first was when he advised me to enroll in his graduate seminar, Africa in World Politics, where I found myself the only undergraduate in a room full of PhD students from around the world. He always seemed to take a special interest in my contributions, certainly another expression of his encouragement. That same year, as I was preparing for graduate school, he invited me for what I would describe as a “debriefing” or “exit interview.” In a very frank, paternal talk, he cautioned me that I would encounter resistance to my chosen scholarly and career paths, as some would question my right to teach African history. And, reminiscent of his question to me the first time we met a few years earlier, Mazrui asked, “Are you prepared to deal with this?” I felt confident that I was, for many personal and ideological reasons, and indeed I have faced occasional resistance, even hostility, over the years, but that conversation with Mazrui serves to reassure me on those difficult days.

Since then, we kept in touch, through letters, then emails when the latter became more widespread in the 1990s, chance encounters in Ghana, and sitting down to chat at the annual meetings of the African Studies Association. I particularly enjoyed those occasions, when Mazrui, walking in the midst of an entourage of colleagues and assistants, students and admirers, would beam his big smile when he noticed me, stop the train of people behind him, and ask about my family and work. It was an honor and privilege to invite him to Memphis in 2003 when he delighted a filled-to-capacity auditorium with a typically Marzurianaist lecture entitled “The African Predicament: Legacy of Partition, Lure of Reparations.” And, as he had done with me and countless others during his many decades of teaching, Mazrui took time to meet with my students, and later wrote me to ask for their contact information so he could continue to stay in touch.

Image Credit: Twitter.

South Africans lack table manners and posture. That’s all.

South Africa TV will soon debut “Real Housewives of Johannesburg.” If that’s not enough, in other news, the country’s first School of Etiquette is now open in one of Johannesburg’s rich northern suburbs.

The owner of the Etiquette School, Courtney Carey, has been doing the media rounds. Much of the coverage, is not surprisingly, soft pedal stuff. In one instance, the American state broadcaster Voice of America asked her about her vision on the strained social and economic relations in South Africa.

In the interview, Carey suggested the true type of capital that stands in the way of the country’s mission to improve social and economic relations is cultural. What South Africans need to all get along, we learn, are manners. And they’re for sale at her school.

Carey studied at the University of Cape Town, but also lists “Washington’s Protocol School and the New York School of Etiquette” as part of her education.

Apart from the general manager of her guesthouse, who is a black Zimbabwean, her team is all white; they are her parents. From her website it’s pretty clear she targeting black South Africans (and their employers).

Etiquette, which Carey defines as “the fine art of getting along with people,” is easily misunderstood as being all about manners. Yet that would be superficial. Instead, underpinning the quality and strength of social relations, Courtney explains, it’s about the right kind of behavior and social skills to suit the situation that you are in.

So, for those South Africans who seek to build better relationships, get promotions, improve their food-intake and expand their entrepreneurial revenue, we’ve distilled the pedagogical foundational of the curriculum, as it was revealed in the interview and on her website, and turned them into five lessons. The quotation marks indicate Courtney’s quotes, the illustrating examples are our own.

First, improve the behavioral nuances of your business persona and ensure you come off as “comfortable and confident in any environment”. This means that you got to invest some serious time in learning “how to deliver a good toast”, as a bad one can be devastating for your social upward mobility.

Second, are you one of those people who keeps her phone close-by, because you don’t want to miss out on a job or something else you think is urgent? You got it all wrong. Eish, if only you know how many South Africans are “losing businesses and friends for making careless use of their cell phones.” Put it away people. Just be polite, for once.

Concerned about food? Focus on your table manners instead. So stop thinking about ‘what’ you plan to eat and be more mindful of ‘how’ you will eat it. Courtney uses soup spilling as an example of the type of ‘irritating’ table manners, that structurally interfere with successful relationship building. The thing with the soup is that, if you keep it too far away from you, you’ll inevitably spill (..) your chances. If you think that’s elitist, you may want to think twice. According to Courtney, “it’s not about snobby eating…we teach people how to dine easier, cleaner and safer”.

Fourth, for those South African women who seek to build better relationships and independent businesses, it is absolutely vital to distance themselves from the deceptive liberalism of the Constitution (which activist groups have put quite some time and effort in). No, girls. Forget about challenging rigid and hetero-normative gender-roles. You’ve got to “let men be chivalrous” and answer his ‘gentleman’ acts with gratitude if you intend to move forward. “A lot of women now believe that because we are emancipated and we can be independent and run our own businesses and lives, that we don’t need a man to open the door for us or carry a box for us or stand back for us when we walk through a door”, Courtney laments. To all those South African women, who are trapped in the economic comfort of their financial independence and safety of their normative sexuality, she sends a strong message that breathes idealism and passion: “ be better mannered to men… and be more feminine”.

Lastly, two key words that should be mainstreamed through the other ones: genuineness and exclusivity. Nothing of the above will work out if you’re not really feeling it and just put up a show. Faking chivalry, etiquette and interest in, for example, a potential client may be tempting (if you’re hungry) but you’re probably better off if you leave the client to a competitor instead. This is because you can only succeed in being attentive to people and making them feel important if “you genuinely believe they’re important”. A practical example would be a business deal that may pay your rent and school fees for two seasons, but that would force you to work with someone who, according to your gut, is not all that important. Don’t bother; it’s not going to work out.

Image Credit: School of Etiquette Website.

 

The Photographs of Thabiso Sekgala

There is one photograph (above) of the late Thabiso Sekgala’s that always reminds me of home. It is of lavender jacarandas lining a country road, paling a little from the weak winter sun. The haze of purple is just past its prime, and the blossoms’ fresh hopes are waning. Perhaps there’s a frost on them. Squat one-or two room homes line one side of this flattened dirt road – and I can see patches of brown on the lower walls, where rain has, over many years, splashed mud on to the lime wash. In the back, a fog obscures the skyline, and I imagine a river running through. This still life is a familiar memory – walking to school in the high plateau. We moved towards a sky large enough to swallow small bodies. The sun had burnt the winter fog by 7am, but a white snake of vapour slipped over the river’s cold path. When we walked to the top of a termite mound, where we were instructed not to go (mambas made their home there), the whole path of the river revealed itself – the giveaway was the white cotton fog blanket, following the water faithfully through the flatlands of the veld. As a child, one’s meandering path to school and back was as seemingly aimless – yet as directed as this river by the forces of topography. And my trajectory, I knew, was likely going to be different from those who lived in the homes that lined the dirt road.

Sekgala’s name is synonymous with his photographs of former homelands of Bophuthatswana and KwaNdebele, the mostly non-arable lands on which the majority of South Africa’s population were permitted to live during the apartheid years. The 1913 Natives Land Act that limited black South Africans to these lands was intended to refashion black identity as something inherently staid, static, rural. Although these locations –13% of South Africa – were the visible face of political and administrative apartheid, and although there is no law that now prevents their populations from leaving, the long-term effect is that there really is no exit pass for most who live there.

Sekgala knew how to reveal the lie that built the myth of the rural idyll. His images of Bophuthatswana and KwaNdebele are readings of Freud. How was it that Thabiso’s camera knew more about what “unheimliche” meant in ways that that no words of theory could ever capture about being out-of-place in South Africa? Here, we see the ethereal, the heartbreaking, the there-but-not-there cartographies of homescapes that are not home. These are photographs that reflect the solitude of those countryside cousins who live far away enough that we can ignore them, but it is not a solitude that makes us want to return to that “there”. Like the skin of fog that follows the passage of a river, even when the sun has burnt away the cloak of secrecy over most of the land, Sekgala’s photographs expose the invisible topography of landscapes that nonetheless direct and limit those who are forced to course through those spaces. But somewhere in his photographs is also our will – pushing, moving, at loggerheads with history’s hand.

In many of his images, one sees no people – like David Goldblatt, Sekgala’s camera examined structures, but not the imposing structures like churches and municipal buildings that maintained apartheid in the towns and cities for those apartheid served best. Here, the camera follows the shadow of those plans – the darker end of that grand design – the isolation, the unviability, the impossibility of making life on these patches of bleached land.

But he also photographed the people who had to make life course through that landscape. I’ve always thought about this one photograph of a boy whose slim body finds it impossible to fill out his ill-fitting polyester trousers and pale blue school shirt. The sleeves are rolled up a little untidily, the tie tied a bit too short, and the belt around his slim waist – secure in the wide belt loops of his trousers – bending pliably with his pose. The shine on the trousers’ fabric, near where the boy’s hands slip into the pockets, tell us that they have been well-worn – perhaps by an older brother. This is a proud child, looking in askance at the photographer – you know he’s a bit naughty. A small frown wrinkles the space between his eyebrows. The sky behind him is as bleached as his shirt, and the distant point of habitation – signified by blurred lights and low buildings – wink at the photographer. What will become of this boy? His education?

Sometimes, the world can break your heart, even while it makes you smile.

Like jacarandas, the people Sekgala photographed were not home here. They, too, attempt to flourish, year after year, in lands to which they were transplanted. Sometimes, they line the avenues and flower so miraculously that it is difficult to imagine that they are strangers to this arid landscape, that they have not always been here. We remember home, and we think of these transplants as part of what makes home.

Last year, Sekgala exhibited his work at the FNB Art Fair and at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg, together with Kenyan-born Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, and fellow South African Musa Nxumalo. Ng’ok curated the show, titled “Peregrinate: Field Notes on Time Travel” – it was a show that circled around ideas of being both homed and unhomed by one’s returns. I was meant to write a review of their work, but was exasperated, because the two men didn’t send me their work in time for me to write a proper review. “Boys,” I thought dismissively. Instead, I asked Mimi if I could contribute a short story to the catalogue. “Returns” – about the impossibility of going home, about the impossibility of home for those of us whose homes are, in many ways, inhospitable – accompanied Sekgala, Nxumalo, and Ng’ok’s work. I was proud to walk a few steps with them on their journeys.

I wish I had email-bombed Sekgala, and spoken to him about his work. (The only thing that makes displaced people feel a sense of home is speaking to others who are unhomed.) I’d hoped to catch up with him later.

Sekgala was born in Soweto in 1981. He died on October 15. He had many more photographs to take.

Kenyatta went to The Hague: how to bet and win against the (international) system

In the aftermath of the Kenyan 2007 presidential elections, political violence erupted, resulting in 1,200 deaths and the displacement of more than 600,000 people. In the end, three individuals stand accused of crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court: Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy President William Ruto, and the journalist Joshua Arap Sang.

Uhuru Kenyatta went to The Hague as a Kenyan citizen. In a dramatic political performance, Kenyatta stripped himself of his presidential powers, temporarily bestowing them on William Ruto, his second in command, and also on the ICC docket. Apparently, that was the price to pay to assuage the outraged Kenyans who saw their sovereignty trampled by the court. As a Kenyan friend once told me,  a few years ago, some folks in her country were asking how dare prosecutor Ocampo, “someone who rides a mere bicycle to work” summon their leader?

But, whereas many are praising Kenyatta’s bravery for traveling to The Hague rather than skipping his day in court, let’s keep in mind that his appearance was his safest option. Al Bashir reminds us that having an ICC warrant out for your arrest may be a serious nuisance.

What is clear in this Kenyan saga is that the Kenyan state – or more precisely Kenyatta and Ruto — have always managed to stay one step ahead of the Court. From the early days of the legal proceedings against Kenyatta and Ruto, the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor has been playing catch up with these guys, who have demonstrated that you can work within the international legal system and outsmart it at the same time. Long gone are days of the Kenyan political class chanting: “Don’t be vague. Let’s go to the Hague.” Using their ICC indictment as a political platform, former opponents joined forces as the Uhuru-Ruto ticket and won the 2013 presidential elections.

From the beginning, it was not a clear case. Did the Kenyan post-electoral violence (PEV) amount to crimes against humanity? The late Judge Hans-Peter Kaul issued a dissenting opinion, arguing that the ICC lacks jurisdiction ratione materiae in the situation of the Republic of Kenya. For him, the crimes committed during the 2007-2008 PEV in Kenya do not amount to crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute. Nevertheless, when Kenyans failed to adequately put in place the mechanisms to reckon with the PEV, Ocampo used his proprio motu powers to initiate an ICC investigation.

The fact that two of the accused occupied the highest offices of Kenyan executive power made Ocampo’s job tricky, and brought to center stage many of the birth defects of the first permanent international criminal court. The ICC needs the cooperation of the states to carry out its investigations. For example, states grant visas to investigators (although as an international lawyer complained to me this past summer in The Hague “the prosecutor has investigated Darfur but has never set foot in Darfur. It raises an obvious question of how did they do it”).

The Kenyan state’s failure to facilitate the work of the ICC prosecutor has been disastrous to the prosecutor’s case against Ruto. All nine prosecutor’s witnesses have stopped cooperating, which led to the prosecutor having them declared hostile prosecution witness. Some witnesses have also recanted their prior testimonies, revealing that they were coached to incriminate Ruto. The Kenyatta case doesn’t look any more promising for the ICC’s prosecutor. As we await the Trial Chamber’s verdict on Ruto, it is very likely that the charges against Kenyatta will be dropped and the case closed.

Notwithstanding the obstruction of the Kenyan state, the prosecutor has made its fair share of mistakes as well. The Office of the Prosecutor has faced strong criticism for one-sided investigations elsewhere: targeting rebels or political adversaries while turning a blind eye on crimes that may have been perpetrated by government forces in Uganda, DRC and Cote d’Ivoire. And, Ocampo went for a cruise on the Dutch canals with then-Ugandan Defense Minister Mbabazi while the investigation in Uganda should have targeted both the LRA and the Ugandan army. Seriously, I’m not making this up. Sarah Nouwen wrote about it here, page 952 to be precise.

The novelty of the Kenyan cases lay in this being the first time the ICC was prosecuting two sides of the conflict simultaneously, but it seemed to have back-fired when those two sides joined forces to take the state. Now the ICC faces the challenge of prosecuting sitting heads of state.

In the end, if the case against Ruto collapses and the charges against Kenyatta are dropped – a very likely scenario – it will be a blow against the Office of the Prosecutor, but not necessarily a terrible outcome for the ICC. It would mean that a trip to The Hague is not necessarily a one-way ticket, which could dampen the neo-colonial critique of the Court, and strengthen its legitimacy.

For the Office of the Prosecutor, such an outcome could also lead to a new strategy for investigations: investigate first, and according to the findings, decide on who to prosecute, rather than focusing on specific individuals first and then trying to build a case against them. This might leave the court open to less political manipulation.

The Future of The Gettleman

After re-reading this article last night, I traveled to the end of the world and was happy to find that I am still writing insightful pieces such as the below, which was first published in the New York Times on October 19, 2029.

The apocalypse has a silver lining, except it’s black and white – and if we live long enough to procreate another generation, a harmonious hue of caramel. The recent shower of meteorites has done more for inter-racial solidarity in Africa than Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey and Robin Thicke combined.

“I was watching this pale blonde woman running up and down dodging the pieces of falling rock,” muses Peter Otieno, a matatu (minibus) driver in Nairobi, “and I thought, wow! Bazungu may be so powerful but at the end of the day they’re just human, like me.” Otieno offered Erin Vogt, a Norwegian aid worker, shelter in his matatu, which he had strategically parked beneath a grassy bank that absorbed the impact of the meteor shards.

Yesterday, Vogt invited him to her house to thank him for saving her life. It is there that I met him, his calloused hands fumbling with imported china as a huge smile split his face. His eyes occasionally wandered around the room with a blend of gratitude and disbelief.

This time last year, Otieno was probably wielding a machete on the streets. Thanks to the apocalypse, now he was sitting on Ikea furniture with his expat friend, drinking peppermint tea. “It’s nicer than chewing gum!” he exclaimed, eliciting a smile from the elegant Vogt, who admits that this is the first time she has had a black person over for tea.

“The apocalypse changed everything,” she explains. “It was always us bringing them things, teaching them things, helping them make the most of their wealth, you know? Sometimes, as much as you love your work, you would get this sense of exasperation like, will they ever stand on their own feet?” But the apocalypse has brought out a new side in Africans – one marked by resourcefulness, organization and compassion.

This mentality is commanding respect from the large population of white people that have re-settled in Africa since its rise two decades ago. In turn, their vulnerability in the face of the Apocalypse has touched the hearts of Africans, giving rise to a new era of solidarity.

“We are in this together,” declared Otieno. “Erin told me that when she is evacuated after this shower subsides, I can have all her Maasai blankets and her teas. She even followed me on twitter.” Vogt shrugged, seemingly embarrassed by this revelation of her generosity. “It’s the least I can do,” she said modestly. “He is my African brother now.”

As told to Paula Akugizibwe @ihozopa

‘There is no Ebola here’: What Liberia teaches us about the failures of aid

Professor Thandika Mkandawire is a development economist with a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue – one of Africa’s finest.  Last week I moderated a discussion on health and governance in Africa at a conference in Cape Town in which he gave the keynote address.  He demonstrated why he is such a celebrated public intellectual.  In front of an audience of over one thousand scientists, doctors and health systems researchers, Mkandawire paraphrased Georges Clemenceau’s famous quip that war is too important to be left to generals, by suggesting that ‘health is too important to leave to health practitioners.’

In the midst of an Ebola outbreak, and at a conference taking place in Africa, the words – which were intended to be light-hearted – stung.  In part I suspect that this was because they rang true.

While health professionals are crucial frontline responders, the Ebola crisis is indeed too important to be left to medical personnel. Like most responses to humanitarian disasters that are mounted by the international community, the Ebola response is focused too narrowly on the technical aspects of containing a problem, and too little on the underlying social and political reasons why the problem has been allowed to fester in the first place.

Liberia has been especially interesting in this regard. Ebola has certainly foregrounded the reality of Liberia’s non-existent health system but the failure of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s government to contain Ebola is emblematic of much larger problems of governance, leadership and trust. The virus has emerged from the nexus of these overlapping problems.

The Ebola crisis in Liberia has also shone a spotlight on the faults of the international development system that has propped up Sirleaf’s political leadership.  In many ways, one could argue that Ebola serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring cronyism in countries where a government that is friendly to Western governments is in place. Liberia is one of the most dependent countries on Earth: 73% of its gross national income comes from aid agencies and Monrovia, its capital city, is crawling with aid agencies.  There are literally hundreds of international NGOs with offices in the city, and in addition to the 800 million the country receives in foreign assistance each year, the UN spends an additional $500 million annually on maintaining a peacekeeping force.

So one might have expected that the easiest place to contain Ebola would have been Liberia.  There are already 7500 UN troops on the ground who would be able to mount the kind of logistical effort necessary to reach homes and communities with chlorine bleach, to transport the sick and to ensure stability should panic spark violence.  The reality has been the opposite.  From day one, the handling of the Ebola outbreak has been a study in the dysfunction of the aid system.  The aid community has created a mentality that the country cannot act on its own.  Instead Liberia’s leaders have chosen to wait for the slow moving bureaucracies that have occupied it for a decade to wake from the inertia of the well-fed aid system.  They have convened press conference and made pledges, but there is no plan in place for a comprehensive response.

Efforts thus far have been so externally driven that even the identification of the virus itself took place in France. MSF staff who first picked up on the outbreak early this year had to fly blood samples to a lab in Lyons because there is not a single institute for tropical health and medicine on the African continent. This bears repeating: despite the existence of tropical medicine institutes on the continent, the blood samples were sent to Lyons for checking.

The Liberian Ebola situation can be summed up thusly: a virus that is deadly but can be effectively contained with good planning and logistics has managed to escape from a country that has one of the largest concentrations of ‘helpers’ in the world.

It is no wonder then that those requiring the help –  the ordinary people of Liberia – have largely refused to take the advice that is being given to them.  The questions about whether or not Ebola is real began to emerge in April when the media picked up on the story of a group of Monrovians who had attacked a clinic.  The looters had insisted “there is no Ebola here.” So little did they trust their own government that they thought that Ebola was invented by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and others as a ploy to get more development aid.  They were saying, in no uncertain terms, that the hand that feeds them is also the hand that pinches them.

There can be no more damning an indictment on the aid industry than the fact that these deeply held suspicions exist.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, numerous outbreaks of both Ebola and the Marburg virus have been stopped in their tracks in the past few years. In part this is because health workers in the DRC know what to do when they suspect Ebola, which is to act quickly and tell everyone.  They have also learned not to leave people behind when they suspect they might be infected.  Health worker’s trips to Ebola-affected communities factor in extra days to convince those who might be ill to come back with them. This is fairly common knowledge in the public health community, and therefore cannot be unknown to Liberia’s leaders.

The American troops who finally arrived after Liberia’s leaders berated them for taking so long to respond are struggling to acclimate to the heat; their US-made tractors are failing in the terrain and their estimates for how long it will take to build the first centre are projected further and further into the future.  For some reason in the minds of the leaders of those countries most affected by the current Ebola outbreak, Kinshasa is further away from Monrovia and Conakry and Freetown than Washington.

The World Health Organization has also come under fire from Liberia for taking too long to declare Ebola as an emergency.  In doing so, they are pointing the finger outwards, but they are also suggesting that their country has no autonomy and can do nothing on its own. This is not true of course, but to a nation whose leaders are so well trained in the politics of dependency, it is difficult to think outside this paradigm.

For all of their recent economic progress, too many African countries are in a similar position to Liberia.  Like Johnson Sirleaf and her ministers, many of Africa’s leaders have been unable to imagine a future without Western aid.  For its part, the West too has been unable to re-imagine African countries as the complex geo-political entities that they are.  Neither side is able to recognize that African countries have valuable indigenous experience and can move quickly and relatively cheaply in the face of disasters if they leverage one another’s expertise.  Most importantly, African self-help comes without the overhead and the strings that have come to define Western aid.

The failure to recognize this is understandable.  Africa is ground zero for the devastation wrought by decades of bad development advice and poor planning.  Ebola is simply a mask; the ugly face of a global aid system that is broken.  And so the outbreak – in the context of a country that is all helped out – provides a heart-breaking reminder of how little Africans trust the Western governments on whom they rely during disasters.

We may need them, but we are loath to trust that they have our best interests at heart.

The Historic Legacy of Ivor Wilks

I first met Ivor Wilks in 1976, when I appeared in his office doorway – a befuddled, nervous, and apprehensive undergraduate – with a rather vague and naïve idea about applying for an undergraduate research grant to study in Ghana. In retrospect, Ivor had no reason to take me seriously and probably every reason to brush me off, but he did not. He asked me in; he introduced himself first; he asked about my background, and my plans, and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.   

A year later I was off to Ghana and a few years after that I returned to Northwestern to complete my Ph.D. under his guidance. I was a first generation college student when I met Ivor.  I had no absolutely no idea, no clue that there even was such a thing called “graduate school,” much less that it was something I might want to do.   But Ivor was amazingly adept at demystifying the academy and his own discipline of history. He taught history as a craft, much like cabinet-making, and his instructions were straightforward: assemble your tools, hone your skills, practice your craft.

Over the years I have met dozens of Ivor’s former students — in the US. Britain, and in Ghana — and my experience was by no means unique. Ivor was an extraordinary teacher and mentor, patient and generous with his time, and remarkable in his ability to make students (be they disoriented freshman or advanced Ph.D. student) feel that their ideas were worthwhile and deserved to be taken seriously. Indeed, the hallmark of Ivor’s long and illustrious career was the inseparability of his scholarship and his teaching. Ivor lived by the Asante proverb “Nyansa nyɛ sika na wɔakyekyere asie (Wisdom is not gold dust that should be tied up and put away).”  He never recognized a boundary between research and teaching and that, I suspect, goes a long way toward explaining his remarkable success as a graduate instructor and dissertation advisor. In the 1960s, he supervised an entire generation of masters theses at the University of Ghana. Beginning in 1972, he directed the completion of over 30 doctoral dissertations in African history and served on the committees of countless others. Several of those whom he supervised went on to produce the next generation of PhDs in African history on three continents.   

But it is, of course, historical scholarship for which Ivor is best known and many, myself included, would argue that his was absolutely crucial to the founding of African history as an academic discipline in the late 1950s and to its development over subsequent decades. But I know full well that Ivor would throw up his hands in horror if anyone so much as hinted at him being a “founding father” of the field. In 1995, he was invited to give the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial lectures in Ghana – a series of five presentations, which were greeted each night by over a thousand eager listeners. To that audience, he sought to explain his own intellectual lineage – a lineage in which he was no “founding father.” The Muslim Dyula communities, he said, keep detailed records:  “I Muhammad, son of Sulayman Watara, studied under Ibrahim …who studied under . . . [and] in this sense,” Ivor told this audience, “I have no teacher or teachers, I have no isnad, no chain of teachers extending back over the generations. My real teachers were men, and sometimes women, who had no academic credentials whatsoever, but whose understanding of the past was truly remarkable….” Ivor then concluded his lecture by paying tribute to six of those extraordinary teachers: Jacob Dosoo Amenyah, a veteran of World War I; Domfe Kyere of the Kumasi Nsumankwaa, born in the 1860s, whom Ivor met when he was in his 90s; Isaka Dodu, the Chief Butcher of Wa; al Hajj Muhammad Marhaba Saghanughu, Mufti of what was then the Upper Volta; al-Hajj Osumanu Boyo of Kintampo; and, finally, Rev. Joseph Agyeman-Duah, of Kumasi. I am sure that rather than being remembered as a “founding father,” Ivor would want to be remembered as a good student, as one who listened and, in turn, passed on his knowledge, as part of a long lineage that neither began nor ended in the western academy.  Tete ka asom — ancient things, as Ivor learned and as he taught, remain in the ears.

And over the decades, Ivor’s careful listening and keen analytic eye resulted in the uncovering of vast collections of sources for African history and in the publication of an incredible corpus of research. Much of Ivor’s work focused on the Akan states of southern Ghana, especially on Asante. His Asante in the Nineteenth Century (winner of the 1976 Herskovits prize) and Forests of Gold, combined with a host of articles and chapters, uncovered the complexity and dynamism of precolonial African history in ways that remain unrivaled in the historiography of the continent. While much of that historiography, particularly in the early years, focused on politics and the state, largely to counter the ignorance and arrogance of the Trevor-Ropers of academia, it came to embrace a richness and diversity of interests from economic and social history to women’s history, religion, law and education.

While Ivor’s work on Asante is probably his best known, it is, in fact, only one of the areas of African history to which he contributed. His research and publications on Islam, especially on the great networks of the Dyula in West Africa and on Muslims in Asante and in Wa, is among the most distinguished in the field. Again, his painstaking efforts to get at local histories and sources — local chronicles, genealogies, letters and oral reminiscences — have assured that African voices and African histories remain central to the western academy’s understanding of Islam in precolonial West Africa.

Though Ivor was based at Northwestern University for a quarter of a century, his years in Ghana (1953-1966), including as a founding member of the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, forever shaped how he viewed the world and his own place in it. Indeed, the many thousands who attended his lectures in 1995, years after he had moved to Northwestern, are a powerful testament to the high esteem in which he is held in Ghana to this day, and not just within the walls of the university. I have lost count of the number of times that I have asked older, often non-literate, Asantes, about some aspect of their past, and they have simply and patiently told me: “ah, but you must go read Wilks.”  What a perfect tribute to a remarkable historian.

Nante yie, Ivor

Nante yie…

* Ivor Wilks (born 1928), Northwestern University Professor Emeritus of History, died on October 7, 2014 in Wales. A prolific author, meticulous researcher, and a teacher of boundless generosity, Professor Wilks is best known for his foundational texts on the history of Asante and of northern Ghana.

Ebola: Where we are; where we should be

Is it coincidental that the so-called Ebola humanitarian crisis—dubbed global complex emergency by the West—is unfolding on the upper Guinea coast the site of intense activities during the European slave trade? Is it coincidental that the upper Guinea Coast, or precisely the Mano River Basin, which include two Pan-African state projects, Sierra Leone and Liberia, are at the centre of this so-called humanitarian crisis? Is it coincidental that these two nation-states—Liberia and Sierra Leone— just emerging from a brutal civil war lasting more than a decade and bringing life to a complete halt cannot cope with the ebola epidemic because of their broken institutions? Lastly, is it coincidental that Guinea-Conakry, where the ebola scourge allegedly started has the singular distinction of being the African nation that rejected De Gaulle’s offer of integration with France, which eventually unraveled the French colonial empire?

The above layerings—thick descriptions– do not arguably speak to any historical conjuncture in particular. What they do is that they foreground, by way of backgrounding, the issue of context in understanding what has been dubbed a monumental crisis of global proportion by those who always claim to speak for us in their language: the ubiquitous West!

There are at least two fundamental and complementary moral levels at which we can begin to make sense of the current situation. Again not coincidental, the President of Sierra Leone contacted Mr. Ban, the UN CEO, asking for help on 25 May : a date permanently penned in the calendar of African patriots wherever they may be. 25 May entered African history as a shameful compromise wrenched from the progressive forces from above by the internal enemies of African liberation under close watch by the West. 25 May was therefore not a victory for progressive forces in Africa. As if history was trying to mock the Sierra Leonean President, CEO Ban of the UN refused to budge even as Koroma kept on bombarding the CEO with phone calls regarding the ebola issue. CEO Ban’s decision to ignore President Koroma’s raises fundamental questions about independence, dignity, survival and nationhood in our neo-liberal in 21st century.

Why would an independent nation-state in Africa continue to depend on external support from the UN when history has shown time and time again that the UN is not the global all-nations organization that its advertisers make it out to be? Do we need to recall its role in the Congo? In Somalia? In Rwanda? Lacking the wherewithal to tackle issues of daily reproduction, the decadent power brokers of the nation-states in Africa have increasingly become dependent on the West and their multilateral institutions for virtually everything. This dependence; now bilateral; now multilateral; continue to shape relations between Africa and the West as the neo-liberal economic machine becomes the only framework within which solutions are sought. But this internal dialectic—concretely related to the external dialectic— is profoundly about ‘governance’ and the failure to deliver the proverbial fruits of independence. Like the nationalist paradigm before it, the so-called struggle for second independence has failed to take us to the promised land.

How revealing that the response –silence, which should be read as a deafening response— to Koroma’s plea was not a UN mission to save what the West now call the ebola pandemic in West Africa. As a throw back to the history of yesteryears the three countries are to be rescued by their respective colonial patron!!!!! How sad? The British embraced their Sierra Leone creature in the same manner in which the French cuddled their rebellious and prodigal contraption—Guinea-Conakry. To crown it all an African-American president, Hollywood-style, dispatched ‘boots on the ground’ to distant Liberia to continue the work of the American Colonisation Society of the nineteenth century.

If the internal dynamic is profoundly about ‘governance’; the external dialectic is also about ‘global’ governance particularly as it affects Africa’s relations with the outside world. That an imperial rescue mission had to evolve as the preferred form of Western response to the so-called ebola crisis begins to undermine the lie about the UN and WHO in providing the necessary wherewithal to make robust intervention a reality. Both the UN and the WHO are dependent on funding from the imperial citadels. Starved of funds they just cannot function. Much more important is the use of the UN architecture as cover for imperial ambitions. The UNDP, UNIDO, WHO et al operate, or are in business, because of us; the other; they were not designed for or operate in the West. Similarly organisations like WHO, UNDP, UNIDO serve the interest of those at the imperial citadels through funding and control. Like the UN, WHO could not intervene in a timely manner not only because they have funding problems but precisely because the organisation’s haemorrhagic fever department had being dismantled after the SARS scare in 2008/09. Why dismantle a department that exclusively serves a disadvantaged region of the world in an outfit that is supposedly designed as a global institution? Here again we confront the vexing question of governance and its corollary: democratization and accountability.

Ebola has come to signify all that it is wrong in the current world order.  It is a metaphor for neo-colonial machinations, internally as well as imperial dominance globally. Ebola is about governance and democratization at both the internal and external levels. This underlines the moral imperatives of participation; consent; and inclusivity. Internally, absolute-maximum leaders and their minions empowered by top down constitutions sanctioned by the neo-liberal West are incapable of delivering on anything under the sun. Externally, the extent to which so called global institutions—the UN and WHO— are controlled and dominated by those whose activities/interests run counter to our collective national and continental interests, these problems will continue to hamper our forward march. It is not enough to raise these issues only in time of so-called crisis. These issues should perennially be on the menu– they are the issues!

Freetown, Sierra Leone

October 9, 2014

What does it take to become a UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador?

After Africa Is A Country learned that the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) appointed former Spice girl turned fashion designer Victoria Beckham as a Goodwill Ambassador, our team decided to debate, “What does it take to take to become a UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador?” Here’s what we came up with as a way to understand how Victoria Beckham made the cut:

Job requirements:

A history of speaking publicly about sexuality, key to addressing the entrenched stigma around sex and HIV that prevents many people from taking an HIV test. VB: “I dress sexily – but not in an obvious way. Sexy in a virginal way.”


An understanding of gender, and how harmful gender norms impact girls and young women. It’s preferable if you make public statements in this regard. Case in point; VB: “I like little girls to look like little girls.”


Proven commitment to diversity. In VB’s case, she hired one black model out of 30 for a fashion show.


Ability to tweet insights into the future of the HIV response to your following. VB while on a township tour in Soweto –”Education + art = Aids free future.” 


Prior interest, knowledge or engagement in health, poverty, human rights or development beneficial. (VB: “I haven’t read a book in my life.”


Please do not apply if you are interested late in life to revive your career, benefit personally by your association with a cause, or embark on a journey of emotional self-discovery. VB, “It’s taken me to get to 40 to realise I have a responsibility as a woman and as a mother. For some reason people will listen to me. This is the beginning of an incredible journey for me.”

What should it take to become a UNAIDS (or other UN) Goodwill Ambassador? AIAC will run a follow-up post in the next few days; if you’d like to contribute, share your ideas on Twitter/Facebook.

Misunderstanding the Ebola Crisis Is Worse Than Ignoring It

When the first case of Ebola reached U.S. soil last month, the world finally began to pay attention—but not in the right way.  In December 2013 the Ebola virus appeared for the first time in rural Guinea. No one imagined then that it would set-off the devastation that is sweeping across West Africa or the hysteria that has engulfed the world. Closed borders, evacuated expats, canceled flights, quarantined neighborhoods, biological warfare (re: CNN’s poorly chosen headlines): all of it seems more akin to a science fiction movie than a real public health challenge. To be sure, Ebola is a dangerous disease with no treatment or vaccine. What is worse is that we know so little about it, including how the pathogen that until recently was only found in Central and East Africa arrived in West Africa. It is clear, however, that the way in which the outbreak is portrayed in popular media has contributed to confusion, fear and a panicked response, which have only exacerbated an already desperate situation.

Read any article on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa these days and I guarantee you will come across references to Africans eating wild animals, people hiding infected family members from health workers, patients being taken to witch doctors for treatment, or conspiracy theories about how the disease is man-made. The half-truths and out-of-context information inserted into the reports we read or hear about Ebola are implicitly making one point: that it is African primitivism which is to blame for the outbreak (or to quote Bernie Goldberg on Fox News: “Many Africans are Backward People”).  These overly sensationalized stories and outright racist commentaries divert our attention from the real threat to saving lives: collective inaction and apathy.

What we don’t hear about (or hardly so) are the underlying causes that have made this outbreak seemingly uncontrollable—reasons that are disappointingly mundane and don’t make for a front-page story, like this one on Newsweek, fittingly entitled “A Back Door For Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a US Epidemic”, complete with an image of a chimpanzee on the cover.  Essentially, the root of the crisis is the tenuous economic and political state that the countries which have been hardest-hit by the outbreak—Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—find themselves in. Among the least developed places, decades of civil war have only recently given way to fragile stability and slow economic growth in this part of the world. Now more than ever, the hard won economic and peace gains experienced in these countries over the past decade seem to be in jeopardy.

Grappling with an Ebola outbreak in any place is a challenge, but in this context it is nothing short of a nightmare. Healthcare systems in many West African countries were already feeble and unable to address basic health concerns, let alone deal with a public health crisis of this magnitude. In Liberia, a nation of 4.3 million people, there were only 50 doctors in the entire country before Ebola began ravaging medical workers. The World Health Organization estimates that an injection of $1 billion would be needed to mobilize an effective response to the outbreak that could be contained in 6-9 months, in the best-case scenario. Support has been trickling in from other countries but the response has been too slow. To date, aid organizations like Medecins Sans Frontiers, which are at the heart of the response, have been running on limited resources, turning people believed to have contracted the virus away on a daily basis because there is no more room in their health centers. The CDC warns that if the international community doesn’t spring into action soon, the window of opportunity for getting the outbreak under control will quickly close.

Mobilizing funds is the straightforward part. Then there is the politics. The lack of trust in government is likely the biggest culprit for the rapid spread of Ebola in West Africa, as described in this excellent piece about Liberia. “The lesson that the big people in government cannot or will not protect you is one Liberians have learned over a long hard history of exploitation, corruption and war.” The story is not much different in Sierra Leone or Guinea. Though important improvements in governance have been made and West African states are working under extreme pressure to curb the outbreak, the collective memory of betrayal and disappointment has not faded away so easily.

Imagine, one day you are told that there is a dangerous, highly contagious, foreign virus that is spreading through everyday human contact in your community; that quarantining your sick loved ones or your entire neighborhood is in your best interests; that there is no cure for the virus but miraculously some foreigners who had contracted it were able to take a pill that saved them. Who would not have a hard time believing this, entrusting their lives in the hands of their leaders and fully cooperating in a response? Perhaps the majority of us would not be so dubious of our governments, but we must recognize that our behaviors and beliefs are shaped by a certain privileged experience: how many have spent the majority of their lives in a system where government has failed its citizens miserably, time and time again?

My point is that if we really care to understand the Ebola outbreak and seek to support the countries affected by it in a meaningful way, then we must look past all the dramatized, hyped-up, sensationalized stories and recognize that context matters; politics and economic development matter. In an op-ed blasting the international community’s weak response to the outbreak in West Africa, World Bank head, Jim Yong Kim, and humanitarian activist, Paul Farmer, noted that “If the Ebola epidemic devastating the countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone had instead struck Washington, New York or Boston, there is no doubt that the health systems in place could contain and then eliminate the disease”. Though the forecast for West Africa is more sobering, the outbreak is not insurmountable. With international support and a coordinated response the fatality rate could be brought down from 50% to 20% and the epidemic eventually contained.

Yet, so far, the main concern of countries that have not been affected badly by the outbreak has been how do we keep Ebola out, not how can we help end this. In the wake of the first U.S. Ebola case, American lawmakers are urging for travel bans on Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, despite the fact that medical experts say imposing travel bans will only make things worse in these countries.  And so, every time we react to news of Ebola with fear, panic and stigmatization, we miss the opportunity to respond with empathy, support and thoughtfulness. Meanwhile, people continue to die needlessly, and the problem continues to snowball with 1,000 new cases emerging each week.